Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012
NASCAR Media Day
Dodge PR
Daytona International Speedway
Sam Hornish Jr. Open Interview
http://twitter.com/teamdodge www.media.chrysler.com
SAM HORNISH JR. (No. 12 Alliance Truck Parts/WURTH Dodge Challenger R/T) WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ENTERING THIS SEASON? “I’m really excited about it. I feel like we’ve got a great opportunity with our Alliance Truck Parts and WURTH Group Dodge Challenger. I just feel like we’ve got a lot of things that we are capable of doing if we are smart and get some good finishes to start off the year, build up our point base. We want to run for the championship and we need to continue to work well with our teammates and try to learn as much as we can to have both of the Penske Dodge Challengers running up front. I’m just really cautiously optimistic about the whole thing, so I feel like the more that we can be smart, work together, do the right things, we just need to get off on the right foot and get through the first five races, get a good, solid points base and then figure out where we’re at and what we need to work on and what we’re doing right.”
WINNING THE NATIONWIDE SERIES CHAMPIONSHIP WON’T BE EASY FOR ANYONE. “Well, I sure hope it’s easier for us than some other people. I look at Ricky (Stenhouse, Jr.) who returns as the champion and Austin Dillon coming in as the truck series champion. I mean, there’s a lot of guys who are going to be strong, a lot of well-funded cars, because it’s one thing to have the drivers and the car counts there, but to have the driver and a well-funded car running every weekend for the championship, there’s some good teams out there.”
COMMENT ON YOUR WIN AT PHOENIX. IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A BREAKTHROUGH WIN AND WAS THAT FOR YOU IN THE NASCAR WORLD? “It sure made everything a lot better, but at the end of the day it helped us in a lot of things. We were really close to being able to sign our deal to be able to run full-time. We were trying to figure out which sponsors were going to do how many races and then, when we won, we had more races sold than we had races. It helped solidify everything and give us a great opportunity for this year to be able to move forward. The best way I can put it is it just gave us a lot of momentum going into the off-season. It probably made it a lot more difficult, though, having three months away from the race track for racing purposes.”
YOU HAVE A LOT OF BIG WINS IN YOUR CAREER. AT WHICH RACE WERE YOU AT YOUR BEST? IS THERE ONE THAT STANDS OUT? “Probably the race I was at my best I didn’t win, I didn’t even finish. It was the 2003 Indianapolis 500 and we were about 70 horsepower down from a lot of the other teams and the only other car that had the same engine manufacturer as me at that time, the closest one to us, was almost three laps down to us off the pace. We were running fifth with two and half laps to go and the engine blew up. We finished 15th even though our engine blew up, but that was a day that I ran a better race than any race I probably ever won in the IndyCar Series, including when I won the Indianapolis 500. I felt like I did everything right. We started kind of towards the back. We made good decisions. We didn’t have good pit stops, but I just was able to go out there and keep kind of struggling along and doing the right things. Pretty soon, here we are fifth with a couple of laps to go. It was probably one of the more heartbreaking days. That would have been like a win that day to be able to come out of that race in fifth. There were a couple of Cup Series races at Pocono that I ran pretty well in. We either had too many cautions or not enough cautions. About three in row there where we were leading within the last 15 to 10 laps of the race and we either get three yellow flags or we wouldn’t get any. It was always the opposite of what we needed.”
YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE LARGE GATHERING AROUND DANICA PATRICK. “I saw Danica get interviewed one time and I don’t know that’s whose over there (laughter). Everybody is like ‘Well I’m going to ask you a question about Danica. How do you feel about that?’ Well I’ve known her for about 20 years, so I’ve probably been asked about every question. I’ve probably been lucky enough to probably get asked more questions about her than probably anybody else.”
YOU’VE KNOWN HER SINCE YOU GUYS WERE KARTING AS KIDS. WHAT HAS IT BEEN LIKE TO WATCH THIS THING GROW INTO WHAT WE SEE TODAY? “I’m sure that it’s good for the sport. It’s got to be. There are a lot of people that get their eyes brought to this because of Danica, Danica Mania, however you want to look at it. I feel like probably the biggest thing that we have to take out of it is you’re getting more eyes on it. Not everybody is going to watch and be a fan of hers. You kind of try and pick and grab and, you know, get the fans and the people that are interested in what you are doing when you get the opportunity, whether Danica brings it in or Travis Pastrana or whoever else has a big name and a big following. You just have to take advantage of those as much as you can. A lot of people ask me ‘What do you think about it? What can be done better?’ and probably the big thing is when she’s having a bad day or whatever else, we don’t need to maybe look at it every five laps or whatever; every 10 is okay. People say ‘Oh man I was trying to watch the race and I saw Danica all day.’ But I think that if anybody has a problem with that, I mean that’s their own issue to deal with at the end.”
WHAT PITFALLS SHOULD SHE EXPECT IN THE TRANSITION FROM INDYCARS TO STOCK CARS? “You know, it is a lot more difficult. The one thing that I would say that I feel like she really has going for her that I didn’t have the advantage of is I won 19 races in 116 starts on the Indy car side and three championships in the eight years that I was over there. I only ran seven full-time seasons. The last season I spent back and forth between Indy cars and I knew that was not going to help me win the championship that way. I feel like I had a lot of success and when I came over here, I felt like if I didn’t have that same kind of success that people were going to doubt me and what I was capable of. So I probably pushed myself a lot harder than what I should have. She’s got the sponsorship around her that she’s going to be able to do this for a long time, so she just needs to be smart about how she goes out there. You don’t have to do big things right away. You have to go out there and learn, finish races. I can see if I had 2008 (his rookie season in Cup) to do over again, things would have been a lot different, but you only have one time to go through it. I got lucky enough to get a second chance.”
WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY IN 2008? “Well I might have felt like, you know, if I get lapped five times in this race, it’s okay as long as I sit there and learn instead of trying to beat my brains out to try and run in the top 10 and end up wrecked and have a hundred laps to watch everybody else go out there and race. I felt like I had to have the success here that I had in Indy cars or everybody was going to consider it a failure. Even though that might not have been my opinion of it, I was more worried about what our sponsors and the fans thought. I still get people saying come back to IndyCar every time I see ‘em. There was a lot of pressure, I felt like, to go out there and be successful right off the bat.”
